This invention relates to a method for producing colour recommendations for painting a structure or part of a structure for example the interior or exterior of a building, a motor vehicle, mobile home or ship.
The difficulty in selecting colours or colour schemes for structures described above is visualising the appearance of the structure when painted in a particular colour scheme. Generally colour schemes are designed from colour charts and paint swatches provided by paint companies. The problem is that such colour charts and swatches are relatively small in relation to the structure or part of a structure as a whole and so prevent an accurate impression being obtained of the finished work.
We have now found that colour schemes can be produced more satisfactorily, and therefore will give more acceptable results particularly to DIY consumers when it is possible to see at least approximately how the whole of a structure or part of a structure will appear when a colour scheme has been applied to it.
WO 98/47106 describes a method and associated apparatus for showing a scene incorporating a number of objects, such as items of furniture. A surface finish selector is also provided to enable a user to select a surface finish. This surface finish is downloaded from a remote source and is mapped onto the object in the 3D scene. The mapping of the surface finish is performed locally.
Local mapping requires a great deal of local system resources to be allocated to the task. This is undesirable as the local system will have reduced performance. Initially the user starts with a scene that can be constructed locally, or previously downloaded from a remote source. The scene however has to have items of furniture inserted by the user. This can take quite some time for a user, especially as the local system has reduced performance due to the local mapping.
The resultant image, being built up using discrete structural and furnishing archetypes, can be made to look structurally similar to a users room, but suffers from a lack of realism in the graphics of the displayed image.
FR 2 702 291 describes a process of simulating a repetitive pattern on a digital image. There is described a catalogue of repetitive patterns and images of rooms stored locally at the terminal. A user accesses the catalogue of images and highlights the areas where a pattern is to be applied. The local terminal then maps the pattern onto the image. This document requires that the pattern is repetitive. Furthermore, the catalogue appears to be stored locally to the terminal. This means that the catalogue is limited by the capacity and performance of the local terminal. Accordingly, the mapping of the pattern onto the image is all performed locally with the corresponding disadvantages as set out above.